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Articles by Mary Chen
BMC Helix AIOps and Service Management Agentic AI Innovations Revolutionize User Experiences
IT and operations teams are continually called upon to achieve new levels of efficiency, accelerate responses, and improve business uptime while also increasing employee productivity and improving user experiences.
Building trust and ensuring compliance to tackle security challenges in the age of AI
We are fully in the era of artificial intelligence (AI), and as businesses unlock unprecedented opportunities for growth and efficiency, AI agents (also known as agentic AI) are providing assistance for in-context insights, incident response, change risk prediction, and vulnerability management in IT service and operations (ServiceOps).
Building trust and ensuring compliance to tackle security challenges in the age of AI
We are fully in the era of artificial intelligence (AI), and as businesses unlock unprecedented opportunities for growth and efficiency, AI agents (also known as agentic AI) are providing assistance for in-context insights, incident response, change risk prediction, and vulnerability management in IT service and operations (ServiceOps).
How agentic AI can alleviate vulnerability risks for SecOps
Security and IT operations (SecOps) teams face serious fatigue dealing with rapidly evolving threats. Traditional vulnerability management requires too many manual tasks before finding a fix as SecOps teams can take weeks and even months to review documentation, make recommendations, and coordinate vulnerability patches. That’s a lot of time for an attacker to exploit vulnerabilities and potentially compromise your organization’s systems and data.
How agentic AI can alleviate vulnerability risks for SecOps
Security and IT operations (SecOps) teams face serious fatigue dealing with rapidly evolving threats. Traditional vulnerability management requires too many manual tasks before finding a fix as SecOps teams can take weeks and even months to review documentation, make recommendations, and coordinate vulnerability patches. That’s a lot of time for an attacker to exploit vulnerabilities and potentially compromise your organization’s systems and data.
BMC Helix LLM Observability Helps Optimize Model Training and Application Performance
We have seen an explosion in large language models (LLMs) and generative AI (GenAI) techniques over the past two years, and the transformative power they bring to a wide range of applications is only beginning to be realized. For IT operations (ITOps), it’s hard to ignore the significant advantages that individuals and businesses can gain—from generating incident summaries and pinpointing root causes to recommending remediation steps.
BMC Helix LLM Observability Helps Optimize Model Training and Application Performance
We have seen an explosion in large language models (LLMs) and generative AI (GenAI) techniques over the past two years, and the transformative power they bring to a wide range of applications is only beginning to be realized. For IT operations (ITOps), it’s hard to ignore the significant advantages that individuals and businesses can gain—from generating incident summaries and pinpointing root causes to recommending remediation steps.
Reducing Change Failures with a New BMC AI Agent
Change is the largest source of production issues. For organizations practicing DevOps, changes created through continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines can cause significant outages if they are not properly assessed.
Securing terminal emulation and green screen access from evolving threats
The breadth and complexity of modern cyber-attacks have made the potential for an attack on IT infrastructure, including mainframes, a matter of ‘when,’ not ‘if.’ Oftentimes, these attacks come down to system access—a bad actor who shouldn’t be there slips into critical systems, resulting in disaster. It’s a reality that is growing increasingly common. In fact, incidents involving the use of stolen or compromised credentials increased by 71% year over year in 2024.
Reducing Change Failures with a New BMC AI Agent
Change is the largest source of production issues. For organizations practicing DevOps, changes created through continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines can cause significant outages if they are not properly assessed.
New Wave of Innovations in BMC Helix AIOps at Connect 2024
Inefficiency and increased vulnerability due to visibility gaps in IT operations (ITOps) and security operations (SecOps) can leave IT teams constantly playing catch up. The BMC Helix AIOps release for BMC Connect 2024 aims to solve these challenges, all while improving the overall operator experience with BMC HelixGPT.
BMC Helix Release Improves IT Efficiency and MTTR with New AI Assistant and Automations
Historically, resolving complex service performance issues required IT teams to have years of experience. However, during an incident or an outage, it may be hard for these teams to find information about the systems or infrastructure, or know which actions to take to resolve problems. With the ever-growing complexity of IT environments, IT teams require a new level of efficiency to find the root cause and resolve issues.
What Is the Python Match Case Statement and Why Use It?
What Is the Python Match Case Statement and Why Use It? Featured image via Unsplash+. When Python 3.10 was released, it included a very important new feature called the match case statement. What this does is give you even more control over the flow of your programs. With match case statements, you control what parts of code are executed if/when conditions (aka cases) are met.
Building With Flutter Using Visual Studio Code: A Dev Guide
In my previous post, we looked at the construction of a small Flutter app. It was dense, but provided a very strong idea of how Flutter apps are constructed: An overall stateless widget that is the app frame and code root. The contents, which feels like building a responsive app with JSON and a CSS framework like Bootstrap. Relatively simple events, listeners and state changes.
GitHub Models: Review of Microsoft’s New AI Engineer Platform
Last week, GitHub announced the launch of GitHub Models, a new addition to the existing marketplace, which makes it easy for developers to consume the latest generative AI models. I got early access to GitHub Features and here is my review and analysis of this offering. What Are GitHub Models? GitHub Models are pre-trained generative AI models that can be used for a variety of tasks, such as text generation, embeddings, and chat.
Tackling the Challenges of Logical Replication in PostgreSQL
Distributed Postgres vendor pgEdge continues to tackle the complexities of logical replication with its latest version, known as the “Constellation Release,” which offers enhanced parallel processing, large object support and error handling. The greater throughput, flexibility and control make pgEdge a viable open source alternative for legacy database workloads requiring multimaster capability, according to Phillip Merrick, pgEdge CEO.
CloudBees Welcomes AI-Powered Testing, ‘Prodigal Sons’ Home
DevOps specialist CloudBees has enhanced its CI/CD and DevSecOps platform with new AI capabilities by acquiring Launchable, an AI company focusing on optimizing software testing and development processes. Ironically, a key factor in this move is the return to CloudBees of Kohsuke Kawaguchi and Harpreet Singh, former CloudBees employees who worked on Jenkins (previously known as Hudson). The two left CloudBees to launch Launchable in 2019.
OpenAI's ChatGPT Now Formats Output to Developer Queries
OpenAI, the company behind the popular ChatGPT Large Language Model Generative AI service, has released a tool that will return query results in the exact format specified by users. This has been the most-asked for request among developers using the AI technology, according to the OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Since its debut in November 2022, the ChatGPT service has been harnessed by countless application developers for agent-driven and other apps.
Netlify Aims To Simplify the Frontend With Cloud Primitives
When Matt Biilmann, CEO of Netlify, gave his original JamStack talk in April 2016, he used a diagram to show how complex the web development world had become. Now, eight years later, he said that complexity is creeping back into the frontend. “We’ve gone a bit through the cycle where, for moments, we’ve reduced complexity a lot,” Biilmann told The New Stack.
Build a Rock, Paper, Scissors Game on PostgreSQL With Database Programming
Modern databases are durable, efficient, and programmable data repositories, making them super-potent environments for building applications. However, many database features, such as functions, triggers, and materialized views, have fallen out of fashion in recent years.
Fireproof Uses Merkle CRDTs to Cut Database Latency
Fireproof — the developer of a real-time, open source document database that’s lightweight enough to run almost anywhere, including on mobile and edge devices — launched in February of 2023. Eighteen months later, it’s got a thriving community of open source users and contributors. It recently completed its pre-seed funding, led by Engineering Capital, and is set to unveil the paid version of the platform, Fireproof Cloud, in November.
Russ Cox Steps Down as Tech Lead of Go Programming Language
Russ Cox, a pivotal figure in the development and evolution of the Go programming language, has announced his resignation as its tech lead. Effective September 1, Austin Clements will take over the leadership role for both the Google Go team and the broader Go project. In his resignation note, Cox wrote, “It’s important to remember that tech lead — like any position of leadership — is a service role, not an honorary title.
Diagnose Issues Faster With AI-Powered Service Modeling
If you manage a modern distributed IT environment, context is critical for troubleshooting and analyzing the business impact of production issues. But that context can be hard to acquire. You might have different teams and observability solutions managing the different layers that contribute to a business service, or different tools that generate useful telemetry data, such as metrics, events, logs, traces and topology, but they operate in silos.
BMC Helix Release Improves IT Efficiency and MTTR with New AI Assistant and Automations
Historically, resolving complex service performance issues required IT teams to have years of experience. However, during an incident or an outage, it may be hard for these teams to find information about the systems or infrastructure, or know which actions to take to resolve problems. With the ever-growing complexity of IT environments, IT teams require a new level of efficiency to find the root cause and resolve issues.
The Current State of LLMs: Riding the Sigmoid Curve
You might have noticed a shift in the air if you’ve been following the AI space lately. The unbridled optimism of a year ago has given way to a more somber, realistic outlook. As someone who spends most weekends knee-deep in AI code and has contributed to projects like LangChain and LlamaIndex, I’ve had a front-row seat to this transformation. Recently, I attended two AI conferences — the AI Quality Conference and AI Engineer World’s Fair — and the change in sentiment was palpable.
Is The Testing Pyramid Broken?
The benefits of new technology aren’t always apparent right away. In 1851, Charles Babbage stated: “One of the inventions most important to a class of highly skilled workers (engineers) would be a small motive power — ranging perhaps from the force of from half a man to that of two horses, which might commence as well as cease its action at a moment’s notice.” Twenty years before the first practical electric generator, Babbage saw the need for the electric motor.
Unleashing Postgres for Analytics With DuckDB Integration
Unleashing Postgres for Analytics With DuckDB Integration contributed, The Postgres ecosystem is winning, making it a for new data workloads and database tools. Much has been written on “why” Postgres is winning, and there are a number of good reasons — including its extensibility — enabling Postgres to extend to new use cases as requirements emerge, demonstrated by pg vector‘s ability to address a variety of AI requirements.
Non-Browser UI Platform for AI Offers Grants to Developers
Pim de Witte, software engineer and CEO of Medal, has a message for developers who want to use AI in their apps. “If you’re an AI app, you’ve got to get out of the browser,” de Witte told The New Stack. “The point is that there needs to be this private intermediary that is not the browser, because the browsers are owned by the major companies… .” De Witte heads the screen capture platform Medal, which allows gamers to record, clip, edit and share their gaming.
Silos Are Fantastic. Just Ask Kelsey Hightower
Do you feel the rage crawling up you as you read these words: Silos are fantastic. “What is wrong with this guy?” I strongly believe this statement and think we have all been trapped in a lie. The meteoric growth in platform engineering over the last four years proves it. If you don’t believe me, let me bring in some backup. Last month, as part of PlatformCon 2024, the world’s largest platform engineering event, I closed off Day 1 with an incredible conversation with Kelsey Hightower.
The Impact of Changes in IT Service and Operations Management
“What is the impact of this change?” That’s a very hard question to answer in today’s complex digital environments, particularly as cloud and DevOps adoption increases the speed of change. As applications and the supporting infrastructure grow and evolve continuously, how quickly IT operations (ITOps) teams can answer that question will determine how quickly they can diagnose and remediate the problem. Let’s take a step back and explore why it’s important to stay on top of change.
The Impact of Changes in IT Service and Operations Management
“What is the impact of this change?” That’s a very hard question to answer in today’s complex digital environments, particularly as cloud and DevOps adoption increases the speed of change. As applications and the supporting infrastructure grow and evolve continuously, how quickly IT operations (ITOps) teams can answer that question will determine how quickly they can diagnose and remediate the problem. Let’s take a step back and explore why it’s important to stay on top of change.
Manufacturing studies of a polymeric/composite heart valve prosthesis
1 INTRODUCTION Every year, valvular heart defects affect a growing number of patients worldwide, and the number of valvular replacements is estimated to reach 850,000 by 2050.1, 2 Current cardiovascular replacements come in two varieties: durable mechanical valves with unfavorable hemodynamics and hemocompatible bioprosthetic valves which must be replaced every 10–15 years.1-4 To combine the hemodynamics of bioprosthetic valves with the longer lifetime of mechanical valves, polymeric heart...
New BMC Helix ITOM Release Introduces AI and OpenTelemetry Tracing and Enhances Usability to Reduce MTTR
Today’s complex and dynamic architecture makes it increasingly difficult to trace an error back to the root cause of the problem. This results in slow incident response time, which can lead to service degradation and expensive downtime. We’re excited to announce new capabilities in the BMC Helix observability and AIOps solution portfolio that help teams improve service reliability and mean time to repair (MTTR) while streamlining incident management.
New BMC Helix ITOM Release Introduces AI and OpenTelemetry Tracing and Enhances Usability to Reduce MTTR
Today’s complex and dynamic architecture makes it increasingly difficult to trace an error back to the root cause of the problem. This results in slow incident response time, which can lead to service degradation and expensive downtime. We’re excited to announce new capabilities in the BMC Helix observability and AIOps solution portfolio that help teams improve service reliability and mean time to repair (MTTR) while streamlining incident management.
Ben Hunter
Would your organization seek an alternative if the open source license for software it uses becomes significantly more restrictive? Recently, HashiCorp changed the licensing for its widely used Terraform infrastructure management software from open source to a Business Source Language, which users can view but not modify. Yes. We require an open source license so we can make modifications and submit changes upstream. Maybe.
Use ChatGPT to Boost Security Operations Center Productivity
Managing the security operations center (SOC) is a constant pain for CISOs and security analysts. Finding experienced cybersecurity professionals who can use and manage monitoring tools skillfully is a longstanding challenge in security. Moreover, SOC processes don’t evolve fast enough to deal with the rapid shift to cloud infrastructures and cloud native application architectures.
Mary Chen
Would your organization seek an alternative if the open source license for software it uses becomes significantly more restrictive? Recently, HashiCorp changed the licensing for its widely used Terraform infrastructure management software from open source to a Business Source Language, which users can view but not modify. Yes. We require an open source license so we can make modifications and submit changes upstream. Maybe.
How Python Is Evolving
How does Python evolve? Stack Overflow explored the issue on its podcast, with Pablo Galindo Salgado — one of Python’s core developers, and one of the five people on Python’s steering council.
VMware Expands Tanzu into a Full Platform Engineering Environment
Enterprise software provider VMware is expanding its Kubernetes platform to include an internal development portal and a runtime for applications to span multiple clouds. The company unveiled these enhancements Tuesday at its annual user conference, VMware Explore, being held this week in Las Vegas.
OpenTF: Disgruntled HashiCorp Rivals Fork Terraform
(Editors note: This post has been updated on August 29 with the latest developments) It didn’t take long before certain prominent members of the Terraform community released “The OpenTF Manifesto,” which called on HashiCorp to revert the change and commit to remaining open source for the foreseeable future. The manifesto promised that if HashiCorp didn’t acquiesce, they would fork the project. Last week, that assembly followed through, officially announcing the impending arrival of OpenTF.
Artificial Intelligence: Stopping the Big Unknown in Application, Data Security
Artificial intelligence, particularly large language models of the GPT type, were the talk of the town during last week’s Black Hat and Def Con in Las Vegas. But even the experts disagreed to what extent AI changes the security posture companies should take, from protecting internal data to developing applications.
RevOps: Navigating Common Challenges for Consolidated Operation
Revenue Operations (RevOps) has been a trending topic in business recently, especially within rapidly growing SaaS companies. While go-to-market operations functions began to take root sometime in the late ’90s, it wasn’t until the mid-2000s that the buzz truly began about the promise of RevOps and the value of streamlining B2B operations across go-to-customer functions (marketing, sales, customer success) and providing an end-to-end customer experience.
What Does It Mean for Web Browsers to Have a Baseline
For users, the promise of the web is simplicity — you don’t have to install anything, just type in a URL or search. But for developers, it’s about reach and portability — and that requires strong compatibility and interoperability between browsers.
Why Developers Need Their Own Observability
That’s the question software developers repeat all too frequently. Something went wrong with the app they were working on. Did they introduce a bug? Was it something a colleague changed? Or perhaps it was some kind of infrastructure issue somewhere between the frontend and the backend? In the bad, old waterfall days, developers worked in boxes. Not only were Dev, test and Ops entirely separate endeavors, but even within Dev, frontend and backend teams worked largely independently of each other.
Cloud Optimization: Practical Steps to Lower Your Bills
Cloud computing offers organizations the ability to scale in ways that were impossible only a decade ago, and today thousands of companies are doing just that. However, with great power comes great responsibility. If companies fail to optimize their cloud systems effectively, they may encounter additional expenses, fail to meet performance expectations and even face security risks.
Platform Engineering Not Working Out? You're Doing It Wrong.
As organizations seek to move faster to anticipate and serve customer needs, they often make one of three mistakes, according to Purnima Padmanabhan, a senior vice president at VMware. Mistake No. 1: customers equate application modernization with simply moving to the cloud. “And a lot of times lift and shift of applications happen, and so they’re not getting the benefits out of it,” said Padmanabhan, who is also VMware’s general manager for modern apps and cloud management business.
SAP on Azure: Quick guide for deploying SAP workloads across Azure Availability Zones
Deploying SAP workload across Azure Availability Zones ensures high availability and fault tolerance for your mission-critical business applications. Azure Availability Zones provide physically separate data centres within an Azure region, each with its own power, cooling, and networking infrastructure. By strategically distributing your SAP components across zones, you can protect your SAP systems from zone-level failures and provide a robust infrastructure for uninterrupted operations.
How DevSecOps Teams Should Approach API Security
Software organizations need to store data and expose it over the internet to user-based applications. The standard way to manage this is to host APIs. In the following diagram, API endpoints are called by both web and mobile clients. APIs are usually also broken down into manageable codebases, sometimes called microservices, which then call each other. These components are likely familiar to anyone working in software, from business owners to developers, DevOps and compliance staff.
Cloud Dependencies Need to Stop F---ing Us When They Go Down
We are building software faster and with more functionality than ever, thanks to an abundance of third-party cloud infrastructure offerings, APIs and SaaS tools. They are allowing software developers like us to soar. But if these cloud dependencies go down, we go down with them. And because most vendors refuse to provide visibility into their platforms, we’re left scrambling and asking ourselves, “Is it me or them?” In short, we’re f—ed.
Less Bank Regulation, More Non-Bank Lending
May 2023 Less Bank Regulation, More Non-Bank Lending Mary Chen, Seung Jung Lee, Daniel Neuhann, Farzad Saidi Abstract: Bank deregulation in the form of the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act facilitated the entry of non-bank lenders into the market for syndicated loans during the pre-2008 credit boom. Institutional investors disproportionately purchase tranches of loans originated by universal banks able to cross-sell loans and underwriting services to firms (as permitted by the repeal).
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